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AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 



SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY 



BY 



JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON, 

PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK. 



(From the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1899, 
Vol. I, pages 529-535.) 



WASHINGTON: 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 

19 0. 



FEB S 1903 
0. of 0, 



XVI— SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY. 



ByJAMES HARVEY ROBINSON, 
PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK. 



527 



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SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY. 



By James Harvey Robinson. 



Our modern fondness for looking at well nigh everything 
historically , and the development of several new social sciences, 
notably economics, sociology, and comparative jurisprudence, 
have combined to foster so multiform an interest in the past, 
and have led to so vast and so varied an accumulation of his- 
torical knowledge, that the venerable term "histoiy" seems 
no longer adequate to designate multitudinous and heterogene- 
ous events and conditions, which often appear to have little 
more than their bygoneness in common. Like an overgrown 
empire, history threatens to be disrupted into its component 
parts. If the late Professor Seeley was right, it has already 
become only "the name of a mere residuum which has been 
left when one group of facts after another has been taken 
possession of b}^ some science." This residuum, Professor 
Seeley believed, must go the way of the rest, the time being 
"not very distant when a science will take possession of the 
facts which are still the undisputed propertj^ of the historian/ 1 

That history will even thus softly and suddenly vanish away, 
like the baker who met a Boojum, we none of us really fear. 
But it is clear enough that should such a general dissolution 
take place, its results would be most unhappy all around. No 
one can fail, of course, to appreciate the advantages of special- 
ization. It would be as preposterous to impeach it as it would 
be absurdly gratuitous to defend it. The scientific indis- 
pensableness of specialization is everywhere recognized, and 
many would claim a high educational value for it too. With- 
out the continued productions of monographs like those of 
Stubbs, Hef ele, Rashdall, Lea, Harnack, Voigt, Henry Adams, 
dealing with some one phase of human organization or interest, 
or some brief period, progress would cease. Yet this special- 

HIST 00, VOL I 34 529 



530 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

ization has concomitant disadvantages which need to be 
emphasized. 

Only comparatively recently have constitutional, economic, 
and legal history, and the development of philosophy, morals, 
art, and literature become separate fields, subject to intensive 
cultivation. We have hardly had time as yet to see what 
effect this subdivision will have upon our educational system 
or upon the historical treatises which are prepared for the 
public. But the past furnishes us with a singularly conclu- 
sive proof of the disastrous results of putting things asunder 
which are indissolubly associated by nature. The earliest 
form of specialization in history, so far as I am aware, was 
the distinction made between sacred and profane history — a 
distinction that has been perpetuated by our habit of setting 
off church history by itself as something concerning only 
the theologian. 

This differentiation was not due, it is true, to that scientific 
ambition for precision and thoroughness which dictates to-day 
a careful separation of economic or literary history from 
what we may vaguely call history at large. While our mod- 
ern specialization is first and foremost a division of labor, a 
conscious concession to the exigencies of investigation, the 
older distinction between sacred and profane history was at 
first a matter of sentiment, then, later, of prejudice and ill 
will. That certainly renders its consequences douMy noxious; 
but if our newer scientific specialization does half as much 
to distort and obscure our general conceptions of man's past 
as the older has done, it will do incalculable harm. 

We have unwittingly permitted our modern enthusiasm for 
the principle of the separation of church and state to effect a 
corresponding divorce in our historical studies. The result has 
been that we have failed to reckon w T ith a tremendous force 
whose nature and workings should logically be our first and 
chief preoccupation in approaching the history of Europe 
during the past fifteen centuries. I believe that it would not 
be difficult to prove that no single factor in European history, 
whether we regard the growth of the state or the develop- 
ment of culture, can in any way be compared in its constant, 
direct, and obvious influence with the Roman church. Yet 
our prejudices, or our thoughtlessness, practically exclude 
the church from consideration in our manuals of general his- 



SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY. 531 

tory and in our academic instruction. Something is said, of 
course, of the mischievous influence of the papacy, of its 
encroachments on the poor, suffering emperors and kings, 
of the terrible wickedness and degradation of the ecclesias- 
tical system, which Luther bravely showed up. There is, per- 
haps, a perfunctory tribute to the monkish scribe busily copy- 
ing Horace's Satires, or a word about the Truce of God, but the 
church is known mainly for the pope's arrogance, the wrang- 
ling theologians, the inquisition, for its "pigges bones' 1 in- 
dulgences, dirt}' friars, and sly Jesuits. How, it may bo 
asked parenthetically, would the state, that noblest of man's 
creations, to many the very central theme of historical 
research, appear if we heard only of royal adulterers, of star 
chambers, and ship money, of George Ill's "golden pills," 
and Tammany's insolence? In short, the church has been 
represented as a gigantic conspiracy consistently hostile to 
the normal and beneficent social organization. But in reality 
it was the most characteristic and natural production of Euro- 
pean society as it existed in the Middle Ages. It was brought 
forth and maintained b}^ the most distinguished men of the 
period; it included among its officials pretty much the whole 
educated class. As Ave revere our Federal Constitution to- 
day, so Europe, high and low, clergy and laity alike, revered 
the constitution of Holy Church for a thousand years. 

We all know well enough that no band of conspirators 
could erect a permanent system opposed to the needs and 
ideas of the period, but habit and the force of ancient preju- 
dice leads us to relegate a study of the hierarchy to the church 
historian, while the term history means, as usually received, 
those matters unconnected with the church, which appears on 
the scene only as a marplot. 

It is true that we no longer speak familiarly of Antichrist, 
the Scarlet Woman, or the Mystery of Iniquity, as did our 
ancestors, but centuries of Protestant polemic has transmitted 
to us a dull, persistent suspicion of the Medieval Church and 
all its works, which haunts the minds of otherwise impartial 
scholars. Another circumstance has, moreover, blinded us 
still further to the real historic importance of the ecclesias- 
tical organization. We live in an age strikingly secular in 
its spirit and in a country where the exclusion of the church 
from all governmental functions and its reduction to a group 



532 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

of voluntary private associations has been carried out with a 
consistency perhaps unparalleled in the world's history. The 
mediaeval system, which Europe has by no means altogether 
outgrown, appears to us so monstrous a violation of the prin- 
ciples of civil government that only by a persistent and 
strenuous cultivation of an artificial historical sympathy can 
we come to comprehend it, even imperfectly. The position 
of the church to-day in England and France is full of mystery 
to us. Court of Arches, church wardens, advowsons, lords 
spiritual, all are wholly alien to our notions of government 
and property, and yet they are but the scanty vestiges of a 
cunningly devised system under Avhich Europe lived for 
ages — a system which must be understood before there is the 
least chance of understanding the most serious, perhaps, of 
all the momentous problems which have faced Europe during 
the past live centuries. 

The Mediaeval Church was no exclusively religious organ- 
ization. It was a state as well, a state rivaling a continental 
bureaucracy in the importance and variety of its functions 
and in the precision and efficiency of its mechanism. As 
Maitland well says: "We could frame no acceptable definition 
of a state which would not comprehend the church. What 
has it not that a state should have? It has laws, lawgivers, 
law courts, lawyers. It uses physical force to compel men 
to obey its laws. It keeps prisons. In the thirteenth century, 
though with squeamish phases, it pronounces sentence of 
death. It is no voluntary society. If people are not born 
into it, they are baptized into it when they can not help them- 
selves. If they attempt to leave, they are guilty of crimen 
la?saj majestatis and are likely to be burnt. It is supported 
by involuntary contributions, by tithe and tax. " 1 It is obvious 
that this ecclesiastical state, the most powerful, extensive, and 
enduring social organization of which wo have an}^ record, 
bears little resemblance to our Protestant communities. The 
danger of using the same word for what Innocent III and 
Mr. Moody understood by church is indeed appalling to a 
teacher who sees the disparity. If we had occasion to deal 
with the Council of Jerusalem, as described in Acts, and the 
Council of Trent, or with the University of Bologna in the 

1 Canon Law in the Church of England (1S98), pp. 100-101. 



SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY. 533 

thirteenth century and that of South Dakota to-day, we should 
immediately recognize the necessity of making plain the 
ambiguity of the terms as the very first step in our explana- 
tion. Now, while our students and the general public may 
well have a shrewd suspicion, after studying one of our cur- 
rent manuals, that the church over which Hildebrand presided 
must have been very different from the Baptist church around 
the corner, they have no means of appreciating the real nature 
of the difference or of estimating its tremendous importance. 

The same danger of confusion exists in the case of the civil 
authority, for we are almost sure to assume a fundamental 
resemblance between the feudal anarchy and our modern state. 
When Gregory VII hotly asserted that the civil rule was the 
invention of evil men, instigated by the devil, it was, after all, 
no hasty conclusion but the outcome of years of observation. 
We should doubtless all have agreed, could we have witnessed 
the conduct of the average ruler of those days, that the Pope's 
theory of the origin of the state was a fair working hypothesis, 
all things considered. The dictum of Thomas Aquinas that the 
secular power is subject to the spiritual, as the body to the soul, 
was no empty claim. It was not only the most generally 
accepted opinion, but corresponded pretty well with the actual 
political and social relations of the Middle Ages. 

If, then, both church and state in our modern sense were 
unknown in Europe until comparatively recently, might it not 
be worth while to explain so fundamental a matter in our 
manuals, and endeavor especially to make clear the general 
organization of the church, its functions, the sources of its 
power, and the public support which it enjoyed? Indeed, is 
there the least prospect that the public will understand the 
history of Europe at all until we mend our ways and give the 
church its due place? It would hardly be exaggerating its 
importance if we said that the chief interest of the earlier 
Middle Ages lies in the development of the Roman Catholic 
Church; that of the later Middle Ages in its controlling influ- 
ence at the height of its power; that of the past five centuries 
in the revolution which overthrew it and replaced it by our 
modern state and our modern culture. 

In spite, however, of my conviction that the neglect of the 
church is the most conspicuous defect of our instruction in 
general history, 1 should be quite misunderstood if it should 



534 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

be inferred that I advocated a more general attention to church 
history. Not at all; I am not, as I indicated at the start, 
making a plea for any special field of research, but for a 
rational reconstruction of our conception of what should be 
included in a general review of Europe's past. To deal with 
the Lutheran revolt without understanding how the church 
was a secular as well as a religions institution is like present- 
ing our civil war as simply the outcome of a different concep- 
tion in North and South of the nature of the Constitution. 
To define the French Revolution, as De Tocqueville does, as 
the destruction of the feudal system is to belittle it. The Civil 
Constitution of the Clergy betokened as vital a metamorphosis 
as the decrees of August -±-5 abolishing the feudal dues. So 
no elementary study of either the Protestant revolt or of the 
French Revolution can be satisfactory so long as we continue 
to neglect one of the greatest factors in both movements. 

Our attitude toward church history should be on the whole 
our attitude toward economic or constitutional or literary 
history. We must divide the vast stock of historical data 
and conclusions accumulated in all the fields of special research 
into two separate parts. All that is of a technical nature 
should be classed " professional," and should usually be so 
formulated as best to serve the purposes of the expert. The 
exact contents of St. Francis's first rule, the finances of Grlas- 
tenbury Abbey at the end of the fifteenth century, ' or the 
diplomatic antecedents of the Seven Years' War do not 
directly concern the public or the students in our schools and 
colleges. On the other hand, there is much in the thorough- 
going revision which is going on of our notions of man's past 
which persons with no special knowledge of history will be 
glad to know and will be the better for knowing. 

This distinction between the technical and professional and 
the popular and general phases of our subject doubtless 
appears to be very trite and very self-evident. Trite it is not, 
however, for onty modern conditions have rendered it impera- 
tive, and so little self-evident is it that some of our most 
serious perplexities may be ascribed to a failure to recognize 
it in our instruction and writing. In this country at least 
history is hardly yet regarded as a technical subject reserved 
for those who have been prepared by professional training to 
pursue it. Until recently all our historical works were sup- 



SACRED AND PROFANE HISTORY. 535 

posed to meet the needs both of the public at large and of the 
rare student who might appreciate the purely esoteric. 
Obvious]}^ we can not continue to do this, for, in the first 
place, the scholar is becoming more exacting and demands a 
concise, technical statement of the results of research; in the 
second place, if the public and our college students are to gain 
the best which history has to give, our whole energy must be 
directed toward freeing our presentation from every unessen- 
tial detail which serves only to obscure the great issues and 
transformation of the past. No detail maj T be admitted simply 
because it is true or "interesting" or important to a spe- 
cialist. Each particular detail chosen must substantiate, 
enliven, or illustrate the mjanifold general truths whose number 
and importance increase daily. 

"The history of education," Rashdall well says, "is indeed 
a somewhat melancholy record of misdirected energy, stupid 
routine, and narrow one-sidedness. It seems to be only at 
rare moments in the history of thS human mind that an 
enthusiasm for knowledge and a mairy-sided interest in the 
things of the intellect stirs the dull waters of educational com- 
monplace." * This depressing reflection is as true of histor- 
ical instruction as of any other branch of education. But we 
are now all busy stirring the dull waters of educational com- 
monplace. The development of special historical studies 
implies a careful reconstructing of our general view of the 
whole subject; and whether we ultimately accept Ranke\s view 
that the foundation and development of the political order is 
far the greatest achievement of our race, that it alone gives 
continuity to the story of the past, or whether we discover in 
the progress of culture the true import of history, we shall 
learn to look back with amazement and pity upon a period 
when general history was taught as if the Church of Rome 
were a negligible factor. 



1 Universities of the Middle Ages, II, 705. 



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